Anya Kamenetz: DIY U: The Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Anya Kamenetz discusses her new book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. The price of college tuition has increased more than any other major good or service for the last twenty years. Nine out of ten American high school seniors aspire to go to college, yet the United States has fallen from world leader to only the tenth most educated nation. Almost half of college students don’t graduate; those who do have unprecedented levels of federal and private student loan debt, which constitutes a credit bubble similar to the mortgage crisis. The system particularly fails the first-generation, the low-income, and students of color who predominate in coming generations. What we need to know is changing more quickly than ever, and a rising tide of information threatens to swamp knowledge and wisdom. America cannot regain its economic and cultural leadership with an increasingly ignorant population. Our choice is clear: Radically change the way higher education is delivered, or resign ourselves to never having enough of it.

In 2004, financial speaker Anya Kamenetz broke new journalistic ground when the Village Voice nominated her for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her work on the series “Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young.” In January 2005, the series became a biweekly column and Kamenetz became one of the youngest columnists in the paper’s history. Today, she reaches millions with her “Generation Debt” online column as a personal finance expert for Yahoo! Finance. She is also a staff writer for Fast Company magazine, where she recently took second prize in the Education Writers Association (EWA) 2009 National Awards for Education Reporting for her article “Who Needs Harvard?”